Not So Bad [BoyxBoy]

“What?!” Patrick yelled, his eyes popping and his mouth hanging open. 

Pierre cringed and looked away, forcing his attention down to the grass beneath his feet. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as two large tears found their way from his eyes and slid slowly down his flushed cheeks.

“Holy fuck! You’re serious?!” Patrick yelled, looking from one to the other nervously. 

“Yes!” Sebastien yelled in response. 

“Dude! Since when are you a faggot?!” Patrick threw at Pierre, causing Pierre to look slowly up at his friend. He could have handled the yelling, he could have even handled one or both of them hitting him, but to be called a faggot? Pierre’s face contorted in pain and he cried harder, this being the only way he knew to respond. In that moment he wanted to take it all back, but there was no turning away from what he’d brought upon himself. Helplessly, Pierre started to move toward his friends, wanting to force them to see that he hadn’t changed, that he was still their friend, that he was still a good person. As Patrick took several large steps back and shook his head, Pierre felt himself breaking further. “Dude, don’t fucking come near me,” Patrick spat at him. “You’re sick.” He shook his head slowly, staring at Pierre with cold hatred, before turning to Sebastien. “Come on, let’s go,” he muttered, before starting to walk away. 

Sebastien and Pierre stared at each other for what felt like an eternity, and as Pierre thought back on it, what he’d taken for cold indifference, he actually saw as a mask of anger shielding his pain from Pierre. “Seb…” Pierre breathed as he took several more steps toward his friend. 

Sebastien watched him approach, before looking at Patrick’s retreating back. He shook his head and started to walk backwards, following after his other friend and shaking his head slowly. “Fuck off,” Sebastien muttered, before turning his back to Pierre and walking away. 

Pierre saw the world swim before his eyes before falling to the ground, his hands tangling in the short grass and pulling hard on it as tears poured in torrents down his cheeks. He had never felt so low; he’d never felt so insignificant; he’d never felt so alone. That was the last he’d spoken to either of his two best friends, and though he avoided them in classes and in the halls during their last three weeks in high school together, Pierre could hear them laughing at him as he passed, could hear them abusing him for the whole school to hear. By the time graduation had come around, everyone in the school knew that Pierre was gay, and though most of them didn’t care, there was still an intimidating amount of people yelling insults at him in the halls, stuffing used condoms in the slits of his locker, and other horrid things that still, to that day, amazed him were possible of teenagers. Someone had even gone so far as to write ‘God made AIDS to kill the gays’ on his locker. To say the least, by the end of those three weeks, Pierre wanted to die. 

And even after he’d graduated, the hate continued. He continuously got emails or messages sent to his face book, sending him deranged images or else quotes from the bible. After deleting his face book and changing his email address, Pierre allowed himself to be cut off from anyone and everyone. How was he supposed to trust anyone anymore? How could he open up and say, ‘hey, this is me,’ without worrying about the constant backlash? He wanted nothing more than to move away, to escape, but his parents were insistent that he should try to solve his problems at home, rather than letting them chase him away, though it seemed that no matter how long he gave it, he just couldn’t escape the pain. Perhaps he could have dealt with it with Sebastien by his side, but his mind continued to replay that look on his ex-best friend’s face, and Pierre knew that there was nothing left for him there. 

Eventually Pierre’s dad had arranged for Pierre to go live with his brother — Pierre’s uncle Martin. The only problem was Pierre’s uncle wasn’t a Canadian resident. He lived in a tiny town in Oregon called Junction City, a town with a population of 5,031 people. Coming from a city with a population of 1,620,698 people, the idea of living in a town so small took Pierre some getting used to. Pierre agreed to go live with his uncle, though it took him several years to save up enough money to move and obtain a work visa so he would be legally allowed to work and live in America. He didn’t want to be an illegal immigrant, after all. And though three years had passed since Pierre had come out to his friends and lost them forever, he still felt an immense sense of security when he packed his bags in mid-June and left, not sure if or when he would ever go back. He’d lived with his uncle for a short amount of months, taking up space in his house only for as long as it took him to find an apartment of his own and a job — pumping gas, and how bizarre that Oregon was the only place in the world where one couldn’t legally pump their own gas. Since then, he’d been living independently, though his life consisted of nothing but work, home, sleep, work, home, sleep. More often than not, he found himself thinking that the solitude only made him feel worse, not better.